It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

There was some question about whether this distinction is due to the fact that atheists are on average more educated that religious believers. However, when the survey results were statistically controlled for education the results came out the same. Atheists know more about religion even than equally well-educated religious believers.

Many people, upon reading of these results, have focused on what made atheists so knowledgeable about religion. An equally important question, however, is what makes religious believers so ignorant about religion.

One implication of the relative ignorance of religious believers about religion is that remaining religious requires some level of ignorance about the details of the basis of religious belief. The survey found that religious believers were astonishingly ignorant about their own religions. Forty percent of Catholics didn’t understand their own church’s teaching about the meaning of Communion, for example. Atheists knew more about the Ten Commandments than Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, did.

Another implication is that belief in one particular religion encourages ignorance about other religions. So, less than a third of Christians know who the gods Vishnu and Shiva are, while 72 percent of atheists do.

Christian groups have been pushing hard for the teaching of their own religion in public schools under the guise of “religious literacy”. The results of the Pew Center’s U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, however, suggest that if people truly want Americans to become more religiously literate, the last thing they ought to do is to follow the example of Christian organizations. Instead, people who are interested in helping Americans become genuinely more knowledgeable about religion ought to look to the example of how atheists learn to see what they’re doing right.

12 comments to Atheists Know More About Religion Than Religious Believers Do

The LA Times has a piece in which academics speculate about the psychological reasons for this pattern. But there is a good sociological reason to expect this: atheists are a small group, and small groups are forced through social interaction to not only be familiar with their own group’s set of knowledge, but also to be familiar with the larger group’s knowledge set. Larger groups are less likely to encounter the smaller groups and so can remain blissfully ignorant of their traditions. A Pew finding consistent with this theory is that Muslims and Jews — two other small religious groups in America — are also much more likely to answer religious questions correctly than American Christians.

The survey made a distinction between people who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics and people who just don’t think about religion much, categorizing themselves as “nothing in particular”. Still, even this “nothing in particular” group knows more about the categories of “world religions” and “Religion in public life” than Christians. Only in the category of “Bible and Christianity” did Christians know more than the group of religious indifferents.

Liberal Buttons, Political Bumper Stickers and Sweat-Free Shirts

To keep our voices independent of moneyed interests, the writers of Irregular Times have never accepted money for advertising on this website. But we still have to pay the bills! To help cover our expenses, we sell our own designs of liberal activist bumper stickers, buttons and sweatshop-free shirts.